Baker Academic

Monday, July 24, 2017

Friend of the blog Baker Academic Press is sponsoring a giveaway of Matthew Bates's Salvation by Allegiance Alone. We know, we know . . . this is a blog about historical Jesus studies. But we know that our readers are interested in the important developments in the study of early Christianity as a whole and this book has managed to cause a ruckus. Here's the press's description:

"We are saved by faith when we trust that Jesus died for our sins. This
is the gospel, or so we are taught. But what is faith? And does this
accurately summarize the gospel? Because faith is frequently
misunderstood and the climax of the gospel misidentified, the gospel's
full power remains untapped. While offering a fresh proposal for what
faith means within a biblical theology of salvation, Matthew Bates
presses the church toward a new precision: we are saved solely by
allegiance to Jesus the king. Instead of faith alone, Christians must
speak about salvation by allegiance alone. The book includes discussion
questions for students, pastors, and church groups and a foreword by
Scot McKnight."

You know the drill. You can enter the giveaway by (1) leaving a comment, (2) signing up to follow the blog and leaving a comment saying you did, (3) sharing the giveaway on any and all forms of social media and leaving a comment saying you did, or (4) the wild card entry. For this wild card entry, you have to tell us a book or article that completely changed your opinion on something; you started the book or article holding one idea and you finished holding another. It doesn't have to be limited Biblical Studies or New Testament Studies.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Readers of the Jesus Blog may be interested in this new book in the Library of New Testament Studies. Hilde Brekke Moller has written the first full assessment of Geza Vermes's impact on historical Jesus studies.

About The Vermes Quest

Geza Vermes is a household name within the study of the
historical Jesus, and his work is associated with a significant change
within mainstream Jesus research, typically labelled 'the third quest'.
Since the publication of Jesus the Jew in 1973, many notable Jesus
scholars have interacted with Vermes's ideas and suggestions, yet their
assessments have so far remained brief and ambiguous. Hilde Brekke
Moller explores the true impact of Vermes's Jesus research on the
perceived change within Jesus research in the 1980s, and also within
third quest Jesus research, by examining Vermes's work and the reception
of his work by numerous Jesus scholars.

Moller looks in
particular depth at the Jewishness of Jesus, the Son-of-Man problem, and
Vermes's suggestion that Jesus was a Hasid, all being aspects of
Vermes's work which have attracted the most scholarly attention.
Moller's research-historical approach focuses not only on the leading
scholars of the field such as E.P. Sanders, J.D. Crossan, J.P. Meier and
C.A. Evans, but also sheds light on underplayed aspects of previous
research, and responds to the state of affairs for recent research by
challenging the rhetoric of current historical Jesus scholarship.

Table of contents

AcknowledgementsAbbreviationsPart I: IntroductionCh. 1: The Significance of Geza Vermes for Jesus ResearchCh. 2: Vermes and Jesus ResearchCh. 3: The History of Jesus Research: Mapping the Quest(s)Ch. 4: Vermes' Jewish Jesus (1973)Ch. 5: The Significance of Jesus the Jew (The 1970s and 1980s)Ch. 6: The Jewishness of Jesus Before VermesCh. 7: The Significance of Vermes' Work on the Son of ManCh. 8: Final Considerations on the Jewishness of Jesus Within Jesus ResearchPart II: The Significance of Vermes' Hasid TheoryCh. 9: Vermes's Hasid Theory and its PrecursorsCh. 10: The Hasid Theory Within Jesus Research After 1973Ch. 11: Hanina Ben Dosa Heals From a Distance: A Case of Christian Influences Upon Talmudic Judaism?Part III: Conclusions and OutlookCh. 12: Conclusion Ch. 13: OutlookBibliographyIndex

Friday, July 7, 2017

The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book (an intro-level treatment) on Jesus. This is a short assessment of Eta Linnemann's reaction to Bultmann.

It would difficult
to overstate the influence that Bultmann had on students of the Gospels,
Christian origins, and the historical Jesus. Scholars endeavored to stratify
the layers of the Gospels to discover what was original to Jesus, what was part
of the earliest Christian preaching, or what was invented much later. The
project was called “Form Criticism” and promised to apply a more scientific
system of classification for the traditions of Jesus and the Gospels. For
generations, historical-critical scholars were either motivated by Form
Criticism or set against it in reaction to its success.

In some ways,
Bultmann was a victim of his own success. Two related consequences of his
project were: (1) Form Criticism became preoccupied with the social settings of
the Church. Almost every word attributed to Jesus was thought to reveal
something about a hypothetical community. Moreover, these communities were
thought to be highly creative; they invented a mythology of Jesus based on
their own religious experiences and social concerns. Rather than reconstructing
a historical figure, these scholars began to reconstruct the imaginations of
hypothetical communities. (2) Rather than making the “essence” of Jesus more
attractive to modern folk, Bultmann became a villain to many Christians. His
theories were so compelling that many people of faith had a visceral reaction
to him. Some among the hyper-conservative rejected historical study altogether.
This was the case with one of his own students: Eta Linnemann.

Eta Linnemann’s
early work on the parables and passion of Jesus was much in line with her
mentor’s project. She set out to explain the social settings that gave rise to
the stories. The sayings of Jesus (for the most part) were composed by and for
the early Christians. Supernatural accounts within the Gospels were wholesale
invention. Linnemann did well in academia. Her books were widely read and she
took a Professorship at Philipps
University in Marburg. Indeed, she
felt that her research was a service to God. But Linnemann had a crisis of
conscience. After years of historical training and form-critical research, she
concluded that no meaningful truth could come from her professional life.
Worse, her research had created an obstacle to Christian preaching. She
published the following reflection in 1985:

Today I know that I owe those initial insights to the beginning effects
of God's grace. At first, however, what I realized led me into profound
disillusionment. I reacted by drifting toward addictions which might dull my
misery. I became enslaved to watching television and fell into an increasing
state of alcohol dependence. My bitter personal experience finally convinced me
of the truth of the Bible's assertion: “Whoever finds his life will lose it”
(Matt. 10:39). At that point God led me to vibrant Christians who knew Jesus
personally as their Lord and Savior. I heard their testimonies as they reported
what God had done in their lives. Finally God himself spoke to my heart by
means of a Christian brother's words. By God's grace and love I entrusted my
life to Jesus.[1]

By her own words,
Linnemann had “turned Evangelical.” By entrusting her life to Jesus, she was
pulled from depression, idleness, and alcoholism. By any measure, her
conversion transformed her with highly positive results. She, however, adopted
an adversarial relationship with her past including her previous relationship
with Jesus.

Linnemann spiritual
encounter with Jesus, as she saw it, forced her to recant and repent from her
former profession. She declared her historical study to be sinful and derided
her former publications, “I regard everything that I taught and wrote
before I entrusted my life to Jesus as refuse.”[2]
She threw her books and articles away
and invited her readers to do the same. Her new existential relationship with
Jesus convinced her to throw away her previous portrait.

In my judgment,
Linnemann’s experience echoes many students and seminarians who encounter
historical Jesus research. It is common for these students to either embrace
historical study (as Linnemann did in her early life) or choose an almost
anti-intellectual path whereby faith and history compete (as she did in her
later life). But it must be said that Linnemann’s particular reaction to her
former life would not have been possible without a keen intellectual capacity
to critique her own method. Her post-conversion publications take a bitter and
hostile tone against university culture and historical-critical study more
generally.

While her tone and
rhetoric are extreme, Linnemann made an astute and necessary observation. The
historian can only ever disguise her/his ideology with a veneer of objectivity.
She argued that historical-critical study is not a method; it is an ideology
rife with prejudice. Certainly she offers us a partial explanation for why
historians continue to project their own biases and ideals onto Jesus.

While it would be misleading to label her as
“postmodern”, Linnemann teaches us one of the most important lessons of the
postmodern critique: scientific study tends to break down what it observes. The
modern tendency is to parse, reduce, classify, and utilize. But what happens
when the modern, critical eye turns inward? What happens when the intellectual
mind begins to parse, reduce, classify, and utilize itself? The inevitable
result is that we begin to critique the criticism.

Monday, July 3, 2017

Some readers of the Jesus Blog with an interest in memory studies may like to know about the Memory Studies Association, recently launched by Aline Sierp, Jenny Wuestenberg, and Jeffrey Olick.

They have a website at www.memorystudiesassociation.org
and are getting ready to have a major conference in Copenhagen in January. Although the deadline has formally passed, I have word that they're still accepting some proposals for papers:

Second Annual Conference of the Memory Studies Association

Copenhagen, 14-16 December 2017

Founded
last year in Amsterdam, the Memory Studies Association (MSA) aims at
institutionalizing memory studies as a research field that is able to
provide fundamental knowledge about the importance
and function of memories in the public and private realm. The MSA’s
objective is to provide a central forum for developing, discussing, and
exchanging ideas about the methodology and theory of the inter- and
multi-disciplinary field of memory studies.

By
addressing crucial questions about the challenges and future of memory
studies, this year’s conference will continue the fruitful debates that
began in Amsterdam. A starting point of our discussions
is to further define the ‘third wave’ of memory studies: One of the
central problems of memory studies today is to adjust to the increasing
heterogeneity of remembering without losing sight of national and local
memory formations. Even in our globalized world,
legal and mental borders are far from dissolved. The growing number of
nationalist movements in Europe point to the continued virility of the
national framework of remembrance.

This
conference wants to address “memory unbound” as well as specific
personal, familial or national memories and their mutual interrelations.
It seeks answers to questions such as: How can memory
studies continue to conceptualize the deterritorialized, fluid and
transnational aspects of collective memory without abolishing the
validity of the founding ideas of memory studies? Acknowledging the fact
that memories relate not only to the presence of the
past but also to imaginations of the future, how can we define the
productive power of memory? Should memory studies merely be perceived as
descriptive or should it also have an impact on actual political
debates?

The
Memory Studies Association aims to be the central forum for scholars
from around the world and across disciplines who are interested in
memory studies. Its goal is to further establish and
extend the status of memory studies as a field. As such, this second
meeting of the association invites all those interested in being part of
this important emerging enterprise. As an interdisciplinary forum for
memory studies, we warmly welcome contributions
from various research fields and explicitly invite transdisciplinary
approaches.

Submissions of papers and panels can address but are not limited to:

Memory of migration of refugees and workers

Traumatic memories

Ethics of memory

Memory and the media

Memory and the global

Entangled or multidirectional memories.

Neuropsychological approaches to memory

Gendered memories

Geography and the memory of sites/spaces

Sociological approaches to memory

Memory in the digital age

Memory and cultural heritage

Teaching memory studies

We
would like to encourage both the submission of “traditional” academic
papers and full panels, as well as innovative proposals for workshops,
film screenings, roundtable discussions and more.
Please contact the organizers if you would like to discuss ideas or
have questions.

Sunday, July 2, 2017

Last week in my class on Matthew's Gospel, mine eyes beheld a wonderful student presentation on the form and function of righteousness in the Sermon on the Mount. This got us discussing the following saying:

"The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light" (Matt 6:22).

In keeping with the view that purity is represented by what a person projects, we discussed the ancient view that eyes (rather than receiving light) project light. In this way, Jesus reminds his audience that eyes are literally biological lamps. This is somewhat different than our modern reading of the passage. The modern reader is inclined to think that the eye functions as a "lamp" insomuch as it illuminates our vision. Cf. the New Living Translation: "Your eye is a lamp that provides light for your body. . . ."

The discussion led me to this very helpful summary complete with a few sources.

...a weblog dedicated to historical Jesus research and New Testament studies

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Search This Blog

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Le Donne, Keith, Pitre, Crossley, Jacobi, Rodríguez

James Crossley (PhD, Nottingham) is Professor of Bible, Society, and Politics at St. Mary's University, Twickenham, London. In addition to most things historical Jesus, his interests typically concern Jewish law and the Gospels, the social history of biblical scholarship, and the reception of the Bible in contemporary politics and culture. He is co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Christine Jacobi studied protestant theology and art history in Berlin and Heidelberg. She is research associate at the chair of exegesis and theology of the New Testament and apocryphal writings. She completed her dissertation at the Humboldt-University of Berlin in 2014. She is the author of Jesusüberlieferung bei Paulus? Analogien zwischen den echten Paulusbriefen und den synoptischen Evangelien (BZNW 213), Berlin: de Gruyter 2015. Christine Jacobi is a member of the „August-Boeckh-Antikezentrum“ and the „Berliner Arbeitskreis für koptisch-gnostische Schriften“.

Chris Keith (PhD, Edinburgh) is Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity and Director of the Centre for the Social-Scientific Study of the Bible at St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

Anthony Le Donne (PhD, Durham) is Associate Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary. He is the author/editor of seven books. He is the co-founder of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue and Sacred Texts Consultation and the co-executive editor of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus.

Brant Pitre (PhD, University of Notre Dame) is Professor of Sacred Scripture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans. Among other works, he is the author of Jesus, the Tribulation, and the End of the Exile (Mohr-Siebeck/Baker Academic, 2005), and Jesus and the Last Supper (Eerdmans, 2015). He is particularly interested in the relationship between Jesus, Second Temple Judaism, and Christian origins.

Rafael Rodríguez (PhD, Sheffield) is Professor of New Testament at Johnson University. He has published a number of books and essays on social memory theory, oral tradition, the Jesus tradition, and the historical Jesus, as well as on Paul and Pauline tradition. He also serves as co-chair of the Bible in Ancient and Modern Media section of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Books by the Jesus Bloggers

To purchase, follow these links

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Jesus and the Last Supper

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Structuring Early Christian Memory: Jesus in Tradition, Performance and Text